Quotes About French

The image foreigners have of French cuisine is fattening and very fancy food. But it's not true - French food isn't just rich. The word "healthy" doesn't exist in French. We have many, many words, but not that one. To me, healthy means paying close attention to feeding people.

The number of those who have to be assimilated to the majority is not too high. It remains small compared with the numbers of the majority. But there is one thing - and that is the main reason for this digression - that French and British have in common: to this day they have an immense pride in being French, in being British. The fact that in the meantime both have come down to earth a little has not yet affected their pride in their own nationality and the fact that, if I may express it that way, they are mutual admiration societies: how fine the British are, how fine the French are.

Now I’m really glad that I speak French, because, let’s face it, girls dig it when a guy speaks French. They call it the language of love, and that ain’t no coincidence. Plus, I love my French fans! Très jolie!

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

Haiti was a French colony, but in 1804, the slaves rose up and defeated the French and formed the Republic. For the last 200 years, Haiti has had a very unfortunate history.

An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.

France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.

I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations - that's why we got married really quickly.

When I was a young man, my friends and I and all of us in New York were very influenced by French cinema. French cinema played an enormous influence on those of us who wanted to be filmmakers.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

I am attached to the French language. I will defend the ubiquitous use of French.

If I would want to have a huge audience, I would make American movies, not French movies, because there is a limit of course with French language. If I prefer to shoot in my own language, it is to play with my language, to play in my Paris, and I have complete freedom in France. It's so amazing. If American directors could imagine how free I am, they would have asked for political asylum immediately.

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

I do think they [French] view my writing itself as exotic - though that's probably not the best term for it - to a small extent, mainly because I say things that most French writers would probably hesitate to say for fear of offending someone or upsetting public sensibilities. I don't think that answers the question, but I'm not much good at figuring readers out or I would probably be writing bestsellers.

I only speak a little pigeon French. Just enough to get by with the little French pigeons.

I like French fries," I say. I like French fries? I sound like a slow child in a made-for-TV movie.

I think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, "Oh, another film about love!"

The French are funny, sex is funny, and comedies are funny, yet no French sex comedies are funny.

Surround yourself with people who are the ketchup to your french fries-they make you a better version of yourself. Yes french fries are amazing on their own, but combined with ketchup they are a force. Spend time with people who bring out your true flavors, but don't overpower you.

In France, they make you feel that you cannot be two things at the same time. You can't be French and Arabic; you can't be French and Muslim.

This (French-Kissing) is a really sexy thing to do, according to the French people, although you should bear in mind that they also like to eat snails.

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

If we look at the Gulf War, the same is also true. Indeed, my work on the logistics of perception and the Gulf War was so accurate that I was even asked to discuss it with high-ranking French military officers. They asked me: 'how is it that you wrote that book in 1984 and now it's happening for real?' My answer was: 'the problem is not mine but yours: you have not been doing your job properly!'

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

Steven Soderbergh really likes Irréversible, that's about all I can tell you. About the making, well, it was a very particular situation, because those people all know each other, and they're all big stars. I felt like the little French guy, really. And I was very flattered to be called on that, of course, but I felt like if I didn't find something to be a little original, different, particular in the movie, I would just disappear.

The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

I don't have to 'freedom-kiss' my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.

French girls still have the Jane Birkin culture. You can go just like that, without makeup, without managing your hair.

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.

Franchesca and Sharkey, my French bulldogs, have their own blog. And they are brilliant at it.

Now, now. Southern ladies don’t French-kiss and tell.

When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.

Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you'll have a marvelous time!

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day - the description was, 'Never shot. Dropped once.

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

French fries. I have been obsessed with them since I was born. I like big, big steak fries, curly fries, seasoned fries - any kind!

John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed.

The French debt will remain massive. Savings should be made with cuts to the generous social system, which grants illegal immigrants the same protections as it does our citizens.

I have a nice little house in LA. Well, the bedroom is nice. I have French doors in the bedroom. They don't open unless I lick them.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

My father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him My mother is British, but she's of French extraction.

Its true, Im the youngest, highest-grossing French director. I have a few records, but no one knows or simply doesnt care. Thats good, because I like that. Ultimately, I want to keep working, making a lot of movies, and get better at it. Its about finding great scripts and bringing them to life.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

There is no American history. There is no French history. There is no John Wideman. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!